Alban Berg and Peter Altenberg: Intimate Art and the Aesthetics of Life Author(S): David P
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Alban Berg and Peter Altenberg: Intimate Art and the Aesthetics of Life Author(s): David P. Schroeder Source: Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol. 46, No. 2 (Summer, 1993), pp. 261-294 Published by: University of California Press on behalf of the American Musicological Society Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831967 Accessed: 29-06-2016 15:38 UTC REFERENCES Linked references are available on JSTOR for this article: http://www.jstor.org/stable/831967?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://about.jstor.org/terms JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. American Musicological Society, University of California Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Musicological Society This content downloaded from 129.173.74.41 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 15:38:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Alban Berg and Peter Altenberg: Intimate Art and the Aesthetics of Life* BY DAVID P. SCHROEDER UR FASCINATION with Alban Berg's music has resulted in a peculiarly unbalanced view of this complex composer, and Berg himself has been an accomplice to the distortion. His public avowals of indebtedness to Arnold Schoenberg, for example, have obscured equally strong forces in his development. Even Schoenberg had little sense of how intoxicating literature in general and certain writers in particular were to his pupil. One of the strongest influences early in his career was Peter Altenberg, without whom we would not have had the Fiinf Orchesterlieder nach Ansichtskarten-Texten von Peter Altenberg, op. 4 (Altenberg Lieder). This work, his first with orchestra and his first without Schoenberg looking over his shoulder, defined Berg's future direction as did no other of his early works. Berg's relationship with Altenberg was complex. While the two were friendly and Berg saw him for a time as an artistic mentor, Altenberg's relationship with Berg's future wife, Helene Nahowski, and his almost slanderous poetic representation of Berg in "Be- kanntschaft" proved troublesome.' In his personal library Berg had virtually all of Altenberg's books, and some of these, including Fechsung, Nachfechsung, Mein Lebensabend, and Vita Ipsa, are among the most heavily annotated of all Berg's books. From these works and the person behind them, Berg discovered the possibilities of artistic autobiography, although not in any conventional sense. Rather than creating his works from himself, Altenberg sought to create himself in his works. His world ultimately became an aesthetic one, taking the form of a literary reality, and the person of the artist was created in the aesthetic process. While his links with nineteenth-century roman- ticism remained strong, his readers were no longer in the position of *Research for this article was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. ' This poem, published in Marchen des Lebens and Neues Altes, will be discussed below. This content downloaded from 129.173.74.41 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 15:38:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 262 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY discovering the person of the artist in the work, since the work itself proclaimed the most vivid artistic and personal reality. It is curious that until now almost all writers on the Fiinf Orchesterlieder have completely omitted discussion of the poems used by Berg. The mid-century writer H. F. Redlich regarded Altenberg with an element of moral indignation, and he felt a need to dismiss him as an insignificant dabbler on the lunatic fringe. Redlich believed it necessary to tell us that Altenberg "died in Vienna, half-forgotten, in 1919," and that he "delighted in inventing slightly scandalous texts to picture postcards, in an embarrassing mixture of obscenity and tenderness."' This is indeed a curious characterization of the poet who might have won the Nobel prize for literature had it not been for the outbreak of World War I. 3 One suspects that Schoenberg also may have regarded the texts with embarrassment and distaste: he not only refused to bolster Berg's confidence after the uproar during the performance of two of the songs on 23 March 1913 but also took his pupil to task over these songs.4 Berg seldom discussed Altenberg in his correspondence with Schoenberg, in contrast to his evocations of Strindberg or Balzac, possibly because he felt that Altenberg's decadence would not meet with his musical mentor's favor. Altenberg was more frequently a topic in his letters to Webern, who was attracted by aspects of Altenberg's use of language. For Berg, Altenberg appears to have been very close to the heart of his own artistic outlook, and, one can surmise, he was not prepared to expose the intimate nature of this outlook. To do so would have meant risking Schoenberg's censure. Peter Altenberg For Altenberg, the creation of an aesthetic world went far beyond an indulgence in literature and an intertwining of life and art: the aesthetic world was so pervasive that a change of identity was required, a rejection of his former existence and the formulation of a new reality. The strongest representation of this transformation lay in 2 Redlich, Alban Berg: The Man and His Music (London: John Calder, 1957), 59- Redlich's unwillingness to read the texts seriously parallels a 1913 review that refers to "these gaily nonsensical postcard texts," quoted by Willi Reich in Alban Berg (London: Thames and Hudson, I965), 40o. 3 The two Nobel nominees for 1914 were Arthur Schnitzler and Altenberg. See Andrew W. Barker, "Peter Altenberg," in Major Figures of Turn-of-the-Century Austrian Literature, ed. Donald G. Daviau (Riverside, Calif.: Ariadne, i991), 2. 4Douglas Jarman, ed., The Berg Companion (London: Macmillan, 1989), 51. This content downloaded from 129.173.74.41 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 15:38:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms ALBAN BERG AND PETER ALTENBERG 263 his name. The poet's original name was Richard Englainder; the name Peter Altenberg was no mere pseudonym, however, nor was its use an attempt, not uncommon in fin-de-siecle Vienna, to escape identifica- tion with a Jewish background.5 Before the complete rejection of his original name for both life and literature, he passed through a transitional stage, using, for example, "Richard P. Altenberg" and "P. Altenberg-E" in letters to Karl Kraus.6 The new name was a result of several factors associated with a period of convalescence with a family named Lecher while he was nineteen years old. During this time, which was spent at a resort called Altenberg on the river Danube, he was immensely attracted to the thirteen-year-old tomboyish daughter of the Lecher family, Bertha, who was nicknamed Peter by her brothers.7 Throughout his life Altenberg maintained erotic fetishes, and he had something of a Lolita complex for girls of Bertha's (Peter's) age. More striking, however, was his apparent identification with her (him), a phenomenon described by Edward Timms: "By adopting this boy-girl's name, he was implicitly repudiating the 'masculine' role prescribed for him by society and initiating that cultivation of a 'feminine' sensibility that is so characteristic of his writings."'8 After abortive attempts to gain a formal education, Altenberg drifted aimlessly for a number of years, frequenting coffeehouses, moving in and out of sordid hotel rooms, consuming wildly unhealthy amounts of alcohol and drugs, and living off the good graces of his moderately wealthy family. But though this strange denizen of Vienna's nightlife abandoned his respectability, he did so not because of an overwhelming desire to be a bohemian writer: indeed, he turned to writing only after living the dissolute life for a number of years, and even then had no intention of pursuing it as a career. By chance some of his pieces were noticed by Arthur Schnitzler and Karl Kraus, and through Kraus's championing of his works they reached publication. Altenberg's views of life and literature are set forth in thirteen books beginning with Wie ich es sehe (1896) and ending with Mein 5 For various other Jewish writers, such as Felix Biedermann, Siegmund Salz- mann, and Egon Friedemann, who became respectively Felix D6rmann, Felix Salten, and Egon Friedell, that may very well have been a factor. See Barker, "Peter Altenberg," 6. 6 Edward Timms, "Peter Altenberg-Authenticity or Pose?" in Fin de Sidcle Vienna. Proceedings of the Second Irish Symposium in Austrian Studies, ed. G. J. Carr and Eda Sagarra (Dublin: Trinity College, 1985), 13i. 7 Ibid., 133- 8 Ibid. This content downloaded from 129.173.74.41 on Wed, 29 Jun 2016 15:38:10 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 264 JOURNAL OF THE AMERICAN MUSICOLOGICAL SOCIETY Lebensabend, published in 1919, the year of his death.9 His style of writing is fragmented, with short pieces in verse or prose poetry in the manner of Baudelaire, covering a wide range of matters pertaining primarily to the soul. Such themes as the blending of masculine and feminine, the cultivation of free-spiritedness, and the virtues of isolation are pointedly evident in the passages Berg used from "Texte auf Ansichtskarten" in Neues Altes (191 ).